Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2010/May

Wikinewsie.org

Right now access to the domain is moving over to SSH.

Most content has been deleted, the site will need a good redesign, and proper controls to keep it updated.

Watch this space (while I watch Northern European airspace). -- Brian McNeil (alt. account) /^{alt-talk • main talk'} 09:16, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

I've been out of the loop...

...when did the "What do you think of this page?" box get so much more prominent? I have to say it's a bit overwhelming, but if there was community consensus for it I suppose I'm too late. (Any other updates while I'm at it? I hope to become more active after a hiatus over most of the winter.) Cheers, –Juliancolton | ^Talk 02:37, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

It got implemented a few weeks ago by Bawolff, IIRC. Wasn't really much of a vote on it, more of "silent consensus" as nobody opposed it or objected after it was implemented. If you have a look at the proposals water cooler, you'll see several rather large changes that have been made to the wiki in the last few weeks; perhaps the most important is that the "reviewer" group has been deprecated/will be removed by the devs (and "editor" is now called "reviewer"). Also, there's a proposal to allow bureaucrats to desysop locally (which is about to pass, given there's unanimous support). Welcome back, Julian ;) Tempodivalse [talk] 03:12, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Aye. I also find that "WDYTOTP" box very big and boring :p --Diego Grez ^{let's talk} 03:14, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Works for me then. Thanks for the wb – hope I don't overstay my welcome again. :) –Juliancolton | ^Talk 03:17, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

• It is a bit on the big side, perhaps it should start collapsed-by-default? --Brian McNeil / ^talk 23:24, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

• Possibly, although then I'd be concerned that it wouldn't be so visible. Tempodivalse [talk] 23:26, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

It's at the very bottom of the page, so it isn't like it is blocking anything. Also, we're getting a _lot_ of feedback from it - so I say keep it exactly how it is. --ShakataGaNai ^{^_^} 00:33, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Category protected and bot

Hi... I know that interwiki bots aren't welcome in en.wikinews, but, Is there anyway to make interwiki in Categories?. I've runned my bot in other editions (fr, pt, es, tr) and many categories have problems with categories in english wikinews. A temporal bot flag?... Thanks Superzerocool (talk) 13:52, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Personally, I have no issue with it. What account (User:BOT-Superzerocool is already flagged bot) will it be run under and I'll flag you? --ShakataGaNai ^{^_^} 00:35, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

This should probably be on WN:BOT. I don't see any problem with having an interwiki bot for categories. The date categories are already well covered (Zachery bot adds interwikis, Gordin bot removes interwikis....) but some of the other categories aren't. Bawolff ☺☻ 00:49, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Span classes

I am looking for the page where span class "hideFromNewbies" (used in {{Template:Lead 2.0}}) is defined. (We are in a dire need to implement something like that in huwikinews.) - Xbspiro (talk) 04:55, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Found it. - Xbspiro (talk) 11:09, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

btw, don't forget you need both the apropriate stuff (not all of it) from mediawiki:Common.css/Main Page and mediawiki:Common.js/Main Page to make that work. the class is defined through both those pages, one alone isn't enough. Bawolff ☺☻ 23:58, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

open proxies

I note that open proxies are indef blocked here. Looking at the thread that discussed this, the main oppose reason was the amount of man hours it would take to re-block the proxies. Why block proxies that haven't done anything? At Simple English Wikipedia (which is a much higher amount of socking and vandalism), we get (on a busy day), a max of 3 proxies to block (1-3 yrs). Open proxies rarely edit here, and rarely get re-used (also from experience at SE Wikipedia). Also, open proxies usually do not stay open for long, blocking legitimate editors. For example, when I became an admin on Simple English Wikipedia, there were about 75 indef block proxies going over the past 3 years. I unblocked over half of them as they weren't proxies. Since WN gets much less, why not reduce the block times? Griffinofwales (talk) 01:14, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

I would not be opposed to blocking them for 5 years instead of indef, but also of course support the current practice of indef. Either way is fine by me. :P -- Cirt (talk) 01:15, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

It also appears that the vast majority of indefinitely blocked proxies are proxies that have never edited (although I can't see deleted contribs). Most of the 6500 (didn't count, this was the approx. number given in September) appear to have been blocked in 2006 by a single admin. Looking back in the history, this wiki averages one IP block every three days. Most of the open proxy blocks are done in large groups and it appears that none of them edit. So, by blocking them, you are wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere. Griffinofwales (talk) 11:44, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

If we go and reduce the duration of the block, wouldn't it be "wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere?" Just asking... Pmlineditor ^discuss 11:49, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

That single admin would likely be me. It was housekeeping, and there were issues with hassles through one or two proxies around that time. The simplest thing was to make a guess at the proxy list being used by an abuser and do a huge batch of them. And, I do tend to hit them with nmap before blocking. I am concerned that some of the other admins who block proxies don't. The point Griffinofwales misses is that a blocked proxy may have been used by a registered account; as a Checkuser, I can see that - you can't. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 13:03, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Mmm, I guess I'm also partially to blame for this; I've also contributed to a large portion of proxy blocks. Most of them were cross-wiki abusers, it seemed, at the time, to be good preventative action to block them here before they could vandalise. I don't use a proxy checker, but the Meta and en.wikipedia lists are very reliable, I don't think I could have blocked any no-OPs. Tempodivalse [talk] 14:28, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

@Brian: Actually, I wasn't thinking of you, but you sure have done a lot of them. But what does this have to do with indefinite blocking? @Pmlin: True, a massive waste of time. I think that a better way would be to write a bot that would unblock all indef'd IPs from 2008? and back. Since WN doesn't have much of a problem with open proxies (or not one that I could see from the block logs), it shouldn't cause an onslaught of vandalism. If it does, you can send the vandals my way :). Griffinofwales (talk) 22:19, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

We don't have a vandalism problem. I think we should relax our blocking policies. Benny the mascot (talk) 22:43, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

I agree. --Diego Grez ^{return fire} 23:10, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

Open Proxies are by definition trouble for sites like us. If a user takes down the proxy at that IP then it is up to them to tell us if they want to contribute. My understanding is very few of those IPs relocate so there are very few IPs will be caught up when they shouldn't be; realistically, how many of those would contribute anyway? The possible benefit is dwarfed by the benefits of indefing the things so they can't cause trouble. Pre-proxyblocking we had more vandalism than you might think (e.g. the sex username vandal). To turn this argument on its head: why should we not block indefinitely? Bearing in mind indef does not equal permanent. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 23:36, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

How recent was the sex username vandal? My wiki (Simple English Wikipedia) doesn't do indef blocking and we get along fine. Remember that I'm not advocating unblocking, just long blocks. Also, on Simple, I unblocked 50% of the proxies that were indef blocked since they were no longer open. Indef probably does equal permanent since who would check them? Griffinofwales (talk) 23:45, 18 May 2010 (UTC)

It was actually close to a year ago IIRC (if I'm correctly assuming which of those outbreaks BRS is referring to). There are good arguments for either position here, although I'd like to note that re-blocking 7000 or so blocked IP addresses would take a very, very large amount of time to complete. Tempodivalse [talk] 00:02, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, it was that one. We lost him after wiping out a bunch of proxies. You've obviously not read my comment properly or you'd see that nobody checks them. It's up to the guy who set a proxy up to come and ask if he's that desperate; he must realise the effect that running a proxy will have on his IP. I cba repeating what I've already written about the likilihood of others being caught up. Of course, if somebody wanted to waste their time checking proxies again in five years - feel free. Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 10:12, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

Meh, the only argument for changing anything is "We don't need to". We don't need to do a lot of things, but we do. It's just how we do things. Until we have a solid reason to change our methods - I say we stick with what we got. It works for us. --ShakataGaNai ^{^_^} 00:38, 19 May 2010 (UTC)

• I'll be blunt. I'm not touching this. We're not Wikipedia, we don't bend-over-backwards to expose ourselves to risk.I would deal with any email request from the purported owner of a currently blocked-as-proxy IP. Don't do any unblocking, and honour the de-facto "until proven otherwise" blocking here, unless you will be around to test IPs and cleanup those five years down the line. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 03:43, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

  It doesn't seem that you have to deal with anyways. They almost never get used. My home wiki doesn't do it (with 2/3 of the admins and 50x the vandalism) and we get along fine (max 3yr blocks on OPs). Not sure what you're so worried about. Griffinofwales (talk) 11:42, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

WoW? (Oh, wait, ... That's us - Wikinews on Wheels.) :-P --Brian McNeil / ^talk 14:10, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

Template:NewPortal

This is looking far closer to what I want, and people should start to see where this is going.

Please read the documentation on it, try it out in the sandbox or your userspace, and give me feedback on what else should be possible with it.

No, it will definitely not be going on Category pages. Yes, I still need some Bawolff magic (i.e. a portal-specific MakeLead). And, for the time being, I would only expect it to be used with a single lead.

If you are trying this out in your userspace, please remember you'll need to copy CSS from my example (Portal:Brian McNeil - Sandbox). -- Brian McNeil (alt. account) /^{alt-talk • main talk} 09:25, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

For the part where it links to the other continent portals, why do you have th hr set to 80%? I think it would look better to have it at 100% as right now it kind of looks weird for the horizontal rules to stop half way through. Other then that, definitely looks like its going in the right direction. Bawolff ☺☻ 12:00, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

• Er, help? I seem to have b0rked the wikitable markup (which sucketh mightily). -- Brian McNeil (alt. account) /^{alt-talk • main talk} 23:46, 30 May 2010 (UTC)